This Christmas We Wish You Enough
Aside from exchanging gifts with family and friends, this is the season for giving to those less advantaged and for extending hospitality beyond traditional kinship boundaries. Though it must be said at Nurture Development we’ve been privileged to see gifts exchanged and welcoming(s) for the stranger all year.
From Long Beech to Leeds, Singapore to Sligo, Edmonton to Eindhoven and many more places besides we’ve seen a culture of community flourish, throughout 2018. This necessary counterbalance to individualism and consumerism is a gift of immeasurable value to us all and the planet. And it’s been a pleasure to be a small part of this bottom up movement. A Merry Christmas to you all.
This year, though, we want to extend a special Christmas greeting to those who create moments of belonging that are unseen and untold.
To those neighbours who leave their gates open each day on an urban street in Glasgow, so that their neighbour who has an Intellectual disAbility can close them, because he just loves to and they know that, Merry Christmas.
To those Dutch neighbours who, when they go on holidays, leave their plants to be cared for by Joop (a man who loves plants, but fears open space), Merry Christmas.
To those neighbours who took the adage ‘it takes a village to raise a child’ seriously, and co-conspired with their employers and local young people to create a summer programme with a difference: 17 young people spent the entire summer going to work with their neighbours. To you all a very Merry Christmas.
To the New York Doctor who gives her waiting room over as a free meeting space for community meetings and encouraged her patients to get involved. Merry Christmas to you and all you serve.
And, to the millions of unsung neighbours who show up faithfully everyday, we say Merry Christmas and a very connected and prosperous New Year to you all!
From all at the Nurture Development Team